à la carte – carte blanchehttp://carte-blanche.org
There's more than one way to tell a storyMon, 22 Jan 2018 02:51:47 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.5.2Feminist Hijabis, Masks, and Hashtags: S. K. Ali In Conversation with Jenny Fergusonhttp://carte-blanche.org/feminist-hijabis-masks-hashtags-s-k-ali-conversation-jenny-ferguson/
http://carte-blanche.org/feminist-hijabis-masks-hashtags-s-k-ali-conversation-jenny-ferguson/#respondFri, 12 Jan 2018 08:31:48 +0000http://carte-blanche.org/?p=9663One of my biggest insights has been this: that one book can connect with readers for so many different reasons. I’m so heartened by this realization. That we writers can write one story and diverse souls will connect with many aspects of it. I mean, I always understood this theoretically, as one learns when studying literary theory in university, but, until my book got published, I never understood the freedom this gives an author.

]]>This interview is part of a series of conversations between exceptional writers debuting across genres that have been posted on the carte blanche blog over the past months.

JENNY FERGUSON:
In your bio on twitter, you use the hashtag #UnapologeticallyMuslim. I see this as a radical (in the best sense of the word) and important statement to make. What does it mean to be Unapologetically Muslim in 2018? It is something personal? Does the hashtag define your brand as a Young Adult author? Or is it something else entirely?

S. K. ALI:
For as long as I can remember, even as a very young child, to identify as a Muslim was to proclaim something problematic. I won’t get into the whys behind this—that would take an essay, perhaps a dissertation, and many others have already done this well—but when you find yourself in a position of constantly articulating the humanity inherent in your identity, at some point, points plural, something snaps and you say, enough, I am who I am and that’s it. It’s happened to me several times, this throwing up of my hands to say I’m Muslim and I’m not going to give you any more than that; first in my teen years, then as a woman in her early twenties, mid-thirties and now, as a woman in her forties, once again. The fight ebbs and flows and I hope this phase of just being here in this space, fiercely okay with who I am as a Muslim woman, lasts and I don’t lapse into contortions to make my Muslimness palatable as I’ve done before in order to be “accepted” at some level.

The other part to declaring myself unapologetically Muslim connects to my identity as an author. As a writer, I’m committed to writing authentically not because it’s “trendy” to be an #ownvoices author (gosh, I hate that so much—this concept some people have about diversity in literature being the latest trend), but because I see good art as stemming from raw knowledge and unfiltered experiences. I’m committed to working at being a good artist. This means sometimes diving into things that communities under scrutiny, marginalized communities, may not want to necessarily talk about. Like issues that I’m personally interested in such as misogyny, racism and sexual assault. I want to unpack these issues because in being unapologetically Muslim I recognize that I’m unapologetically human.

My Muslim community is made up of human beings and so we grapple with the ills that all communities do. It’s time to say it’s okay, even though we are under the magnifying glass for almost everything we do, even though we get treated unfairly, negatively, in mass media, even though Islamophobia intensifies everything connected to us, we’re not ashamed to say we’re just as human as everyone else. And if we look at difficult issues from a place of care, despite being unfairly targeted, ultimately, we are the better for it.

JF:
We don’t talk about Young Adult books much here at carte blanche. Why should anyone interested in literature and contemporary culture care about novels meant for teens? What’s happening in the YA world right now that you see as important to all readers?

SKA:
The YA world is an exciting space! Wherever young people congregate is where you can witness change truly happening. A shift is happening in publishing because of young people saying they want to see a shake-up. A whole movement is underway, begun a few years ago, to change the way the publishing industry perceives narratives differing from the ones that made “traditional” sense.

SKA:
Yes. As well as the #ownvoices movement and other such conversations taking place, mainly on social media

This is a seismic shift in understanding that’s (slowly) occurring: an awareness that stories featuring diverse characters are desperately needed and the best people to tell these stories are those who know them the best: authors of those diverse backgrounds.

When I think back to the narratives I read growing up that included people of my background as a Muslim, as someone of Asian background, as a child of immigrants, I’m astounded at how wrong they got things. Because every one of them was written by someone outside these identities and so featured content awash with stereotypes and misrepresentations and something I call ill-representation—an active attempt to make certain communities look bad due to prejudice and implicit bias.

JF:
Oh my stars, yes. Every Indigenous reader or reader of colour or reader from a marginalized religion or other marginalized community is nodding along with you here. We talk about bad representation a lot over on twitter, but ill-representation hits the note so much harder.

SKA:
One day I’d like to write about the effects this had on my young, burgeoning feminist self, to read the depictions of Indian, African and Arab men by colonial British writers and contemporary feminists, who, though they had enough misogyny in their own backyard to tend to, fixated on the evilness of nonwhite patriarchies.

But now, mainly through the activism and efforts of the YA community of readers and authors, there’s a call to clip at this and prune inauthentic, hurtful narratives. It’s ongoing and still very much a work-in-progress but many of the breakout titles of 2017 show a positive change. I made a graphic to illustrate how YA is a LIT space in the literary landscape.

JF:
Anyone who wants to dig into YA, just so you know, this graphic includes some of my absolute favourite reads of 2017, YA or not. Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves was my last read of 2017 and I’m still utterly speechless. Dimaline’s book filled a little piece of me I didn’t know was missing. That’s powerful. That’s what good representation does.

I’d like to keep talking about representation and this entity called Canadian literature. At carte blanche we’ve talked about #CanLit before in our #WhoNeedsCanLit Series featuring poet Gwen Benaway, critic Alex Good, and fiction writer Mehdi M. Kashani, but I’m not done thinking about what it means to be a writer in Canada. Especially for writers who come from Indigenous or marginalized communities and what it means to have diverse content in the Canadian literary marketplace. I really wanted your debut, Saints and Misfits, to be set in Canada. Flying somewhere between upstate NY and Minneapolis, ugly crying and cheering for these teenaged Muslim girls I was hoping against hope that they were, say, Torontonians. Spoiler alert, they aren’t.

At one point, the mention of a sticky, yummy butter tart really got my hopes up. Butter tarts are quintessentially Canadian. Did you sneak that in as a nod to Canada? And why can’t YA novels be set here? Is this something you’re warned away from as a writer? Or was this a deliberate choice of yours, setting Janna’s story in the U.S.?

SKA:
In Arabic, there’s a tidy little word that’s perfect to open this answer: ummah. Ummah means community, and it can be used to refer to many kinds of communities, but it’s mainly used to signify a group with common beliefs. A Muslim ummah is seen as global—comprised of the approximately two billion people who call themselves Muslims. But there are local ummahs too. And my local ummah growing up was truly North American. The friends I made across the border, at the summer and winter camps I went to each year, at biannual Muslim conferences, were as important as my friends at the mosque I attended on the weekends here in Toronto.

I wanted Saints and Misfits to reflect this experience of continental-belonging. I wanted my readership to include my North American ummah as well as a broader range of readers, beyond Canada. So it made sense to situate my story in the Midwest, kind of in the middle of the continent.

There’s a second aspect to this choice that I’m wary of discussing because I know it will awaken criticism. But I hope we’re at a point where we can understand that true change comes from honestly looking at where we need to grow. So, here goes: though multiculturalism is considered intrinsic to Canada’s character and though the theoretical understanding of this has nurtured me and given me a sense of security to write boldly as a Muslim woman, I still see a long way for us to go toward changing general Canadian readers’ receptions of diverse books, authored by diverse writers.

JF:
I’m agreeing so hard my neck hurts from nodding.

SKA:
When it came time to query literary agents, I generally had a sense that Saints and Misfits would be received well by readers beyond Canada’s borders.

Perhaps this has to do with the fact that a lot of the fight for diverse content comes from U.S. readers and writers; maybe it’s because issues of race and prejudice are more in the open, more in conflict and more debated south of our border. I think our false sense of confidence in this area—that we Canadians are authentically open to diversity! we’re a mosaic not a melting pot!—hinders us from seeing the real picture: racism is alive here too, dangerously masked in politeness. How can we forget it was in Canada, in Québec, that a brazen mosque shooting taking the lives of innocent worshippers happened?

Muslim voices absolutely need to stake a louder claim in the mosaic of our #CanLit literary tradition. Among the first questions I get asked on panels I’ve been on in Canada has been, Why did you set your story in the U.S.?Why not Canada? and I know behind these questions is the hope that I value my Canadianness as a writer. Yes, I do value it. But I also want a wide readership to connect with this #metoo narrative that many—Muslim and not, Canadian and not—have experienced.

I will add here that the second novel I’ve completed, a dual POV one, has a Canadian main character who loves her Tim Hortons! (Dare I say that’s way more in-your-face Canadiana than butter tarts? No, I dare not.)

Religion’s a difficult topic to broach, especially when we’re talking about non-Christian religions like Islam or Judaism, or Christian religions many Christians don’t acknowledge as such, like Mormonism or the Seventh Day Adventists.

Until Simon and Schuster created Salaam Reads in 2016, I don’t think I’d ever read a novel with a Muslim protagonist written by a Muslim writer. I admired what you did so well: open up the doors and invite readers inside Janna’s life. Her uncle, the local Imam, is equal parts charming and insightful. Janna’s parents are complicated, yet full of love for their family. Her brother is religious and wants to get married young, but he’s also a philosophy major. Then we meet Janna’s sort-of friend Sausun, the Niqabi Ninjas, and Saint Sarah. (I’m not even going to talk about the Monster here. I don’t want to.)

You’ve created such a rich world—one where you can’t divorce being Muslim from your characters lives and have your characters still remain fully human. That is, this isn’t a surface thing; it’s not just added on. Being Muslim is part of the air your characters breathe—and as a reader it’s so refreshing. Some writers think they can’t write about their religion, that it will close the market off to them. And worse, that it will marginalize them further. What’s at stake when you include religion and religious themes in a book? Is this #ownvoices movement a place for the rest of us to find our place in the market?

SKA:
Because Islam has daily and weekly devotional and congregational requirements, significant months/days of the year, as well as dietary and behavioral prescriptions (such as cleanliness rites), religion is very much a part of life for many Muslims. We fold it into everyday activities in quite a seamless way. Yet non-Muslims don’t generally get to see what this looks like in popular culture as most media depictions tend to center violent, oppressive or oppressed Muslims. If there’s a positive portrayal, it’s often Muslims who don’t “overtly” practice the faith.

With Janna, I wrote some of the regular Muslim life I see around me but that doesn’t often make it into pages or onto screens. It felt like I was writing to fill a huge void—like I had to write so very much to fill this gap in Muslim representation.

When we went on submission with the manuscript, I knew I had to work with Zareen Jaffery at Salaam Reads because she told me she loved how unapologetically Muslim Saints and Misfits was. She appreciated the way the narrative wasn’t written expressively to cater to a non-Muslim readership and yet was still accessible to a wider audience. In speaking with her, I just knew the “Muslimness” in my book would be preserved. And it was—at no point did I feel like I had to compromise the integrity of the narrative.

My experience tells me that for the #ownvoices movement to really gain ground, we need to ensure that there’s diverse representation at the higher tiers of the publishing industry, in addition to the clearly committed allies who are already there (like Justin Chanda, the publisher of Salaam Reads). I’m hopeful that organized efforts such as PoC in Pub (founded by Patrice Caldwell a writer and an Associate Editor at Disney-Hyperion) will contribute to making this a reality.

Another hopeful thing: readers from a wide variety of backgrounds have embraced the Muslimness of Saints and Misfits and have commented on how this aspect of the book was so refreshing to see. I think people are ready for narratives that smash both stereotypes and the status quo and this is ultimately hopeful for a wider variety of diverse experiences, including the religious, to be explored in fiction. Hopeful and exciting!

LS:
With regards to the premise, have you encountered any protest from the Muslim community since your novel’s release?

SKA:
No, on the contrary, I’ve been pleasantly surprised with the embrace it has received on the whole. Though, to be honest, I’ve become convinced that had my debut novel had a “lighter” issue at its heart, there would have been more of a celebratory reception of the book in the Muslim community. Right now, I would describe the support it has received as sporadic but strong. And this has helped me to realize the need for joyous stories featuring Muslim characters (and really, light stories featuring characters from all marginalized communities). I know for the Muslim community, this may have to do with bad representation fatigue—just being tired of the scrutiny yet again after years of ill-representation. Hence, my second novel has been a challenge I’ve taken up: can I write a fun, joyous book featuring Muslim characters? I hope the answer is yes!

FM:
What made you want to tackle sexual assault in your novel? Were you worried about how it would be received? In light of #metoo what are your thoughts on where Saints and Misfits fits into the conversation?

SKA:
I’ve been concerned about women’s issues for as long as I can remember, even as a child, and this meant I awoke early to the realities of the many difficulties women all around the world grapple with. It also helped me see how extensive—geographically and historically—misogyny is. No community is immune and so no community is immune to the trauma and injustice of sexual assault. None. I wanted to tackle this issue because I felt strong enough to do so candidly, from an intersectional space. And that’s where Saints and Misfits fits into the #metoo conversation: it provides a much-needed intersectional lens on sexual assault for teens—and adults.

JF:
Congratulations are in order! Saints and Misfits was long-listed for Canada Reads 2018 alongside some other amazing books—including Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves. As we close our conversation, I’d like to say thanks and give you the last word. What’s been your biggest insight or revelation since your debut was released?

SKA:
One of my biggest insights has been this: that one book can connect with readers for so many different reasons. Some of my readers adored Janna’s relationship with the elderly Mr. Ram. Some thought the romance-lite between Janna and another character I won’t name in order to not spoil things was beautiful. Some were giddy about the sibling relationship—they were so happy that it was authentically conveyed in all its greatness and terribleness. Of course, many were happy to see Muslims represented with nuance. And still others loved the nitty-gritty details of surviving high school because it was so real.

I’m so heartened by this realization. That we writers can write one story and diverse souls will connect with many aspects of it. I mean, I always understood this theoretically, as one learns when studying literary theory in university, but, until my book got published, I never understood the freedom this gives an author.

It, the book you write, truly isn’t yours after it’s published. And I just love that so much, releasing a book from my heart to any of the unique hearts open to it out there. This makes me feel confident to write with unbridled breadth and nuance, hopeful that someone somewhere will find a snug spot to connect with, within the narrative I’ve authored. How wonderful!

S. K. Ali is a teacher and the author of Saints and Misfits, an Entertainment Weekly Best YA Book of 2017and a finalist for the American Library Association’s 2018 William C. Morris award for best debut teen fiction. Her novel has been hailed as groundbreaking in its depiction of a Muslim-American teen’s life. Saints and Misfits has also been long-listed for Canada Reads 2018. Keenly interested in a variety of genres and literary forms, S. K. Ali is currently working on books that reflect this love. She has a degree in Creative Writing and lives in Toronto with her family and a vocal cat named Yeti. She can be found on twitter @sajidahwrites.

Jenny Ferguson is Métis, an activist, a feminist, an auntie, and an accomplice with a PhD. She believes writing and teaching are political acts. BORDER MARKERS, her collection of linked flash fiction narratives, is available from NeWest Press. She lives in Haudenosaunee Territory, where she teaches at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. You can find her on twitter @jennyleeSD.

]]>http://carte-blanche.org/feminist-hijabis-masks-hashtags-s-k-ali-conversation-jenny-ferguson/feed/0Genre, Influence, and Curry: Naben Ruthnum In Conversation with Adèle Barclayhttp://carte-blanche.org/genre-influence-curry-naben-ruthnum-conversation-adele-barclay/
http://carte-blanche.org/genre-influence-curry-naben-ruthnum-conversation-adele-barclay/#respondThu, 14 Dec 2017 06:51:13 +0000http://carte-blanche.org/?p=9651Emily Keeler, my editor when I wrote book reviews for The National Post, asked me if I had any ideas for a long-essay-short-book when she took over Coach House's Exploded Views line. The idea for Curry came from the way I read, which is to pick up an increasing number of books around a central subject I have an undefined interest in--Emily asking that question at the right time led me to actually nail down the reasons why I'd been reading old or atypical novels, memoirs, and travelogues about India. Much of it had to do with the way that market forces seemed to want from my writing, if what I wanted from my writing was money--which, I'm afraid, is true to a not inconsiderable degree.

]]>This interview is part of a series of conversations between exceptional young writers across genres that will be posted on the carte blanche blog over the following months.

ADÈLE BARCLAY:
How did Curry come about?

NABEN RUTHNUM:Emily Keeler, my editor when I wrote book reviews for The National Post, asked me if I had any ideas for a long-essay-short-book when she took over Coach House’s Exploded Views line. The idea for Curry came from the way I read, which is to pick up an increasing number of books around a central subject I have an undefined interest in–Emily asking that question at the right time led me to actually nail down the reasons why I’d been reading old or atypical novels, memoirs, and travelogues about India. Much of it had to do with the way that market forces seemed to want from my writing, if what I wanted from my writing was money–which, I’m afraid, is true to a not inconsiderable degree.

AB: Curry not only examines the genre of diasporic writing and all its permutations but is itself a mixture of genres–food writing, cultural criticism, literary analysis. I’m wondering if and how your experiences as an academic writer and crime fiction writer informed this book’s multi-modal approach?

NR: As an academic writer I was always a steady 6 out of 10, but I did glean some research and argument skills that I could put to use in Curry, certainly—and yes, the range of subject matter that I look at in the book, from recipes to early 2000s stoner comedy movies, lent itself to that blended approach. I was really going for a conversational tone, something that would allow me to manage the sort of argumentative style I was going for: one based in questioning and self-interrogation, not a polemic.

AB: What’s your definition of the currybook genre and what about it has frustrated you as a reader and writer?

NR: I’m going to cheat and crib from the book itself for this answer: “… currybooks typically detail a wrenching sense of being in two worlds at once, torn between the traditions of the East and the liberating, if often unrewarding, freedoms of the West… There’s typically also a generational divide, a bridge littered with pakoras and Reese’s Pieces that cannot be crossed except with soulful looks and tangential arguments. Most often we’re looking at a displaced South Asian character in the UK, North America, or Western Europe, searching for place, belonging, and an outer and inner shape to her identity. This protagonist has perhaps been displaced before birth, by her parents.”

As a reader, particularly when I was unfairly judging these books by the way they were marketed and the audience I felt annoyed to be considered a part of, I was annoyed that the range of brown experience in the west was being repeatedly boiled down into trope-heavy narratives to provide an easy sense of relatability to brown readers (not the worst thing in the world, of course) and a convenient sort of cultural tourism to other Western readers. And then, as a writer, I began to feel it was dreadfully true that I was expected to write in this genre if I wanted a career.

AB: I really liked your emphasis on specificity as a tool for warding off the forceful pull of hackneyed narratives. And yet people do respond sincerely and strongly to well-worn, problematic narrative patterns–especially with regards to stories by and about marginalized communities. How do we train ourselves and convince our audiences to move towards particularity?

NR: I don’t think it’s as important for audiences to question why they are drawn to less particularized narratives—enjoy what you want to enjoy, it’s fine. But as writers, editors, publishers—I think this is a challenge that should be addressed by self-interrogation and wide reading, and a sense that a writer with a strong “voice” is also a writer who is writing stories we haven’t read before.

AB: I’m curious about the moments in your research when your frustration with the currybook genre actually morphed into pleasure. How does pleasure figure in this conversation about bequeathed tropes? Is there space to play? Are there ways that frustration and pleasure get enmeshed when working with generic expectations and limitations?

NR: The pleasure is important in that it both showed me that I’d been, unsurprisingly, wrong to dismiss books that reflected some or many of the currybook tropes as being bad pieces of literature, and it also gave me insight into how I could enjoy writing a book in this world if I were a slightly different type of writer. I think it also showed me exactly how books like the ones I discuss in Curry can be read for readers looking for a sense of recognition, of being represented in the experiences of a published writer—I’m deeply sympathetic to this drive, even if I do interrogate the notion of a homogenous, shared brown identity in the West, and whether such a shared identity is desirable.

I’ve encountered that meshing of frustration and pleasure as a reader and writer of genre fiction, particularly in the crime and horror fields: you do want to be frustrated by the ways in which the story deviates from expectation, and that is part of the pleasure of reading an original work in a trope-heavy genre.

AB: How has your relationship with diasporic writing changed over the years?

NR: I’d shorten that timeframe to months, and say that many of my foolish prejudices, founded as they were in my fears of what was expected of me as a writer, evaporated in my research for this book. There are certainly plenty of awful books that adhere to the currybook code–but also many sincere and worthwhile works of high and popular literature that brush against the tropes–many of which are, of course, founded in truth.

I’m still a reader who isn’t necessarily drawn to books written by people who look like me or may have similar family backgrounds.

AB: In a workshop I took with the poet Cathy Park Hong, she asked us about the distinction between writing to people and writing for or on behalf of people as a useful way of thinking through these issues of representation. How does this distinction resonate with you and your writing?

NR: Very much! I’m a strong advocate of selfish writing, which I think can do as much or more for perceptions of categories of people as deliberately political, “on behalf of” writing can.

AB: I could hear your sardonic voice while reading Curry. I think this tone is integral to your claims–there’s a sincerity embedded in your sarcasm. How does humour allow you to get at these critical knots?

NR: Humour is a way of getting at the truth, not avoiding it. I think a lot of unfunny people think that a joke is a dodge or a cute ornamentation of a difficult subject, but used well, it can be an abrupt and effective way of bringing seemingly disparate points together, or deflating sacred notions that need to be interrogated and re-interrogated.

AB: What kinds of conversations are you craving that this book will spur?

NR: Uncomfortable ones in publishing! And, crucially, I’m hoping that definitions of what constitutes “diverse writing” are pressured a little more by this book.

Naben Ruthnum won the Journey Prize for his short fiction, has been a National Post books columnist, and has written books and cultural criticism for the Globe and Mail, Hazlitt, and the Walrus. His crime fiction has appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and Joyland, and his pseudonym Nathan Ripley’s first novel will appear in 2018. Ruthnum lives in Toronto.

Adèle Barclay’s poems have appeared in The Fiddlehead, PRISM international, Matrix, The Pinch and others. Her debut poetry collection, If I Were in a Cage I’d Reach Out for You, published by Nightwood Editions in 2016, was the winner of the 2017 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and was also shortlisted for the 2015 Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. She received the Walrus Poetry Prize Reader’s Choice Award in 2016, and was the winner of the 2016 LitPop Award for Poetry. She is the Interviews Editor at The Rusty Toque.

]]>http://carte-blanche.org/genre-influence-curry-naben-ruthnum-conversation-adele-barclay/feed/0“Something that poems can do”: Kaveh Akbar in Conversation with Tess Liemhttp://carte-blanche.org/something-poems-can-tess-liem-conversation-kaveh-akbar/
http://carte-blanche.org/something-poems-can-tess-liem-conversation-kaveh-akbar/#respondThu, 23 Nov 2017 15:58:27 +0000http://carte-blanche.org/?p=9634On the way to a reading, Kaveh Akbar talked to Tess Liem about his debut full-length collection of poetry, Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Alice James Books 2017). Among other things, the two discuss the addiction recovery narrative, writing in proximity to violence, and how to allow silence into a poem.

]]>This interview is part of a series of conversations between exceptional young writers across genres that will be posted on the carte blanche blog over the following months.

On the way to a reading, Kaveh Akbar talked to Tess Liem about his debut full-length collection of poetry, Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Alice James Books 2017). Among other things, the two discuss the addiction recovery narrative, writing in proximity to violence, and how to allow silence into a poem.

TESS LIEM:
Let’s start where Calling A Wolf A Wolf starts: with faith, the opening poem, “Soot,” and its opening line, “God comes to earth disguised as rust.” You wrote about your relationship to faith and faith to poetry in How I Found Poetry in Childhood Prayer (LitHub), but I was wondering if you would talk a little bit more about the act of praying as a gesture or an action, the verb part of faith, so to speak.

KAVEH AKBAR:
The book is an addiction recovery narrative and for me a big part of my active addiction, a big part of what I found to be my experience, after the fact, was finding that I had done all this harm to myself and to the people that cared about me, but also to my cosmological, psychological station. As someone who grew up Muslim, but not wildly devoutly Muslim–we weren’t a super religious family–it was there, but it wasn’t. I think a lot of the times people expect when you say that you were brought up Muslim, they think that you just came out of the womb with a full beard and holding a Qu’ran, but like Christianity in America, there’s a spectrum. There’s people who call themselves Christian and never go to church. There’s people who call themselves Christian and only go to church on Easter, you know what I mean? It’s a whole spectrum so it was there the whole time I was growing up. It was important but it wasn’t something where it was being closely monitored by anyone, least of all myself. And in the process of recovery a huge part was and is a process of repairing what I damaged in the active addiction. And part of that process of repair was and is the work of repairing my spiritual self, the damages that I did to my spiritual self. And in that process of repairing, a whole new relationship to faith has blossomed and it’s complicated and it’s difficult and I don’t have any concrete answers about it but the poems are where I go to work that out and I think you very much see that process play out in Calling a Wolf a Wolf.

The language of prayer, the rhetoric of prayer is endlessly fascinating and endlessly potent to me because it’s been part of our human language across cultures and nationalities since the dawn of man very literally. And the yearning for prayer is the yearning for something bigger, and so it’s really potent to try to mine that rhetoric in poetry because there’s something lizard-brain about it. Something that’s hardwired into us.

TL:
Yeah and one of the effects, for me, of your engagement with that rhetoric or prayer was that any instance of speaking or naming or calling became a kind of act of faith.

And there’s a couplet in “Do You Speak Persian?” that I thought about the whole time I read Calling a Wolf a Wolf: “Is there a vocabulary for this? / one to make dailiness amplify and not diminish wonder?” This action of amplifying wonder is in the simile’s you use, the way your poems look on the page, the way in which you put together yourself as a subject, and in the closeness of addiction, recovery and faith.

KA:It’s something I think a lot about, too. I think about how–I was just talking about this with my friend Thora about how wonder is at the heart of all great poetry, and that there is a way in which the world sometimes, when we are oriented a certain way, can conspire to dull our appreciation toward it, to dull our capacity for wonder, and can dull our permeability to wonder. And particularly in this moment in history in America, 2017, when black men are being murdered in the streets and the earth is very aggressively warning us about what we’re doing to it and we’re living in the long shadow of a fascistic regime, there’s a kind of vast conspiracy against our capacity to wonder. And so the work of wonder which seems to me to be essential work for any practicing poet becomes that much more difficult. It’s not a passive process to wonder. And yeah I think that “Do You Speak Persian” is beginning to broach that idea. That moment in that poem especially.

TL:
And this idea is returned to over and over. Later, in the last section of the book, in “My Kingdom for a Murmur of Fanfare” you write, “It’s common to live properly, to pretend / you don’t feel heat or grief…” and there it seems that living without wonder is a kind of numbness. Then you write, “It is comfortable to be alive this way, // especially now, but it makes you so vulnerable to shock–” there is this sense that if you’re not paying attention, if things aren’t wondrous then of course you’ll be shocked about the state of the world in 2017. This is something that makes Calling a Wolf a Wolf feel very urgent.

KA:
I appreciate you reading it so well and that is a great ambition of the book. To feel contemporary to the moment and to be useful in that way. It’s interesting, too, because “Do you speak Persian?” the poem from which you pulled the first line that you mentioned is maybe the oldest poem in the book and the poem from which you’re pulling the other language from, “My Kingdom for a Murmur of Fanfare,” that might be the newest poem in the book so I think you’ve struck upon something really important, which really is a kind of through line.

TL:One of the other ways I was thinking about this book, and I picked up on this word from your interview with Layli Long Soldier on Divedapper, is the idea of proximity. When we’re talking about wonder, proximity becomes very important. There’s “Supplication with Rabbit Skull and Bouquet,” for example, and many others where things that are sort of opposed or opposite are brought so closely together that their opposition is either undermined, or rather, just closely examined.

KA:
So much of the way that I conceived the book is based around this cosmic pull of the poem, which is to say there is a core, a nucleus. There’s a nucleus and that is the content or the subject or whatever you want to call it and then the poem just kind of orbits that. Instead of thinking about the poem that passes through the content or moves in a linear way through a path of content, I think of a lot of my poems as electroning around a nucleus of content. That is to say that in a poem like the title poem, “Calling a wolf a wolf,” [the nucleus] is “inpatient,” and it’s a story about being in a hospital unit. But it’s comprised of phrases that are all separated by medial caesuras so there’s a kind of proximity in the language and there is an accumulative effect to reading all of these phrases. There is a kind of narrative that forms but it’s not linear, it’s orbital. Does that make sense?

TL:
Yeah! I like orbital as a concept. And, with the medial caesuras, there’s also this wonderful line in “Unburnable the cold is flooding our lives,” near the end,

“almost warm a good harm the addictions.” The effect of that–I had been thinking of it like an equation because of the way that it balances with the next line: “…the addictions / that were killing me fastest were the ones that I loved best.” These spaces are about silence, but a side question is how do you read them?

KA:
I read them as breaths. I think that hopefully on the page they read as breaths or pauses that are a little bit softer than the pause that a period or a comma gives. I hope that the edges are little bit more round. I think that that allows the silence to enter the poem. Something that’s really important to me in both reading the poems and composing them is thinking about how to amplify certain silences, too. I study Jean Valentine very closely. I think that she’s the greatest living poet of silence. I’ve said this before but I’ll keep saying it because I want everyone to read her. I study her to try to figure out how to shape the silence in the poem, using the negative space of language, if that makes sense, like if you imagine one of those pictures of a vase where you can only see the vase in the negative space in the darkness around it. You have language being that darkness and silence being the vase. I want to think about how to sculpt silence using language.

TL: There’s also another poem that I was thinking about a lot in terms of silence, which is “Portrait of the Alcoholic with Home Invader and House Fly.” This along with a painting that I think about a lot called Death of Marat.

KA:
Oh yeah! And he’s still clutching that final sheet, right?

TL:
Yeah exactly and–

KA:
Which is how any true writer wants to go out–

TL:
Yeah! This image was evoked for me because there is this kind of silence achieved in that poem where something violent has just happened but we’re encountering the moment after, which is such a heavy kind of silence.

KA:
Yeah I love that. Both involve a kind of–well I don’t want to put too fine a point on it–but I love thinking about that relationship.

TL:
This brings me to the idea of proximity to violence and I wanted to ask you about the poem “Heritage.” This is a response to, or an orbiting around, a person and an event and it has this closeness to violence. I wonder if you would talk a bit about writing in response to violence, either just in that poem, or in general.

KA:
It’s difficult. It’s difficult because there’s a power difference between me and Reyhaneh Jabbari who the poem is about. She is someone who has been violently–had her autonomy violently taken away so in my writing about it–you know, I’m a man living in America who is not subject to–I mean, what she was made to endure is literally inconceivable to me. I have no experiential reference for it. So it’s dangerous and I still have complicated feelings about that poem for these reasons. There are many drafts of that poem that were complete failures. I’ve written about this but there are drafts of that poem that completely get it wrong and completely re-inscribe the violence that was levied upon her. I think that the draft that I eventually landed upon is as–it’s as close as I feel I could come to examining the ways in which I was and am complicit in the kind of culture that has allowed what happened to Reyhaneh to happen. It’s as close as I could come to that without also toeing the line of trying to, you know, hang a banner, around my neck saying “I’m one of the good guys look at me” self-flagellating myself. Because I’m not interested in the kind of poem that says “here’s me performing my contrition. Forgive me.” I would never want to write that poem and I have written drafts of poems that were that. It’s a very very delicate poem, one that I’m glad to have had the experience of having written, but one that I’m still very vexed by. I think about Reyhaneh, Reyhaneh’s story, all the time still. It really haunts me. To this day. From the first day that I read about it, I kind of knew that it would, I knew that it wasn’t going to leave me any time soon. But to this day it really still does linger.

TL:
Because of that poem I re-read the translation of the message she left her mother.

KA:
The letter, yeah, isn’t that the most haunting text you’ve ever read?

TL:
It is–and to me, that’s one thing the poem is doing: bearing witness to that text and Reyaneh, bringing attention back to her. And, you’re right, it’s difficult to think through the ways in which poetry interacts with or responds to these things in the world that haunt us and that we need to deal with.

KA:
Absolutely, and I think there is value too just in the fact that you and I are saying her name to each other. Like we are two people living in America [and Canada] and we’re saying Reyhaneh Jabbari’s name out loud to each other years after she was murdered. There’s something powerful about that, too, just giving breath to her voice. That’s something that poems can do.

Kaveh Akbar’s poems appear recently or soon in The New Yorker, Poetry, The New York Times, The Nation, Tin House, The Guardian, Ploughshares, FIELD, Georgia Review, Guernica, Boston Review, and elsewhere. He founded and edits Divedapper, a home for dialogues with the most vital voices in contemporary poetry. He was the recipient of a 2016 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a Pushcart Prize, and the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. Kaveh was born in Tehran, Iran, and currently lives and teaches in Florida. Calling a Wolf a Wolf is available from Alice James Books and Penguin.

Thanks again to Liz Howard for acting as juror, and to the other finalists, Kasia Juno and Lauren Turner.

Domenica Martinello is a writer from Montreal. She has a collection forthcoming from Coach House Books (2018), and is the author of the poetry chapbook Interzones (2015). She is also an interviews editor for CWILA: Canadian Women in the Literary Arts. Domenica’s recent poems and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Vallum, PRISM, CV2, The Winnipeg Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, and elsewhere. She is completing an MFA in poetry at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. @domenicahope

An exciting announcement for a crisp, fall morning: the finalists for the 2017 3Macs carte blanche Prize, as selected by juror and Griffin Poetry Prize-winning Liz Howard, are Kasia Juno (fiction), Domenica Martinello (creative non-fiction), and Lauren Turner (poetry)! While we wait for the unveiling of the winner, we invite you to read their nominated publications: “The House On Carbonate,” “Ferrante In the Cellar,” and “Self-Trolling,” respectively.

The winner will be announced at the Quebec Writers’ Federation Gala on November 21 and will receive a cash prize and a trophy–originally handcrafted by Glen LeMesurier.

Kasia Juno is a writer, teacher, and doctoral student based in Montreal. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Best Canadian Poetry Anthology (2015), The Rumpus, Maisonneuve Magazine, The Puritan, Cosmonauts Avenue, Frog Hollow City Series Anthology, and the Minola Review, among others. Kasia received the Quebec Writer’s Federation Short Story Prize (2009) and was a finalist for the CBC Short Story Prize (2017). “The House on Carbonate” was long-listed for the CBC Short Story Prize (2016). @kasiajuno

Domenica Martinello is a writer from Montreal. She has a collection forthcoming from Coach House Books (2018), and is the author of the poetry chapbook Interzones (2015). She is also an interviews editor for CWILA: Canadian Women in the Literary Arts. Domenica’s recent poems and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Vallum, PRISM, CV2, The Winnipeg Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, and elsewhere. She is completing an MFA in poetry at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. @domenicahope

Lauren Turner is a Montreal-based poet and writer with a poetry chapbook forthcoming from Knife Fork Book in 2018. Her work has appeared in Geist, Arc Magazine, Minola Review, ottawater, and Bywords. She is a past recipient of the Diana Brebner Prize and a graduate of Concordia University’s MA program in Creative Writing. @sickpoettheory

]]>http://carte-blanche.org/3macs-finalists-kasia-juno-domenica-martinello-lauren-turner/feed/0CanLit for Cynics: Revolutions by Alex Good and Searching for Petronius Totem by Peter Unwinhttp://carte-blanche.org/canlit-cynics-revolutions-alex-good-searching-petronius-totem-peter-unwin/
http://carte-blanche.org/canlit-cynics-revolutions-alex-good-searching-petronius-totem-peter-unwin/#respondWed, 20 Sep 2017 14:34:39 +0000http://carte-blanche.org/?p=9311THIS YEAR SHOULD HAVE been an auspicious one for CanLit. As Canada celebrates the sesquicentennial, it seems every newspaper, blog, and bookshop has a “top 150 Canadian books” list to push. Canada’s 150th also evokes fond memories of the 1967 centennial, when CanLit was just coming into its own. But for many, those 150 lists, chock full of CanLit luminaries like Michael Ondaatje and Margaret Atwood, are hard to stomach right now.

]]>THIS YEAR SHOULD HAVE been an auspicious one for CanLit. As Canada celebrates the sesquicentennial, it seems every newspaper, blog, and bookshop has a “top 150 Canadian books” list to push. Canada’s 150th also evokes fond memories of the 1967 centennial, when CanLit was just coming into its own. But for many, those 150 lists, chock full of CanLit luminaries like Michael Ondaatje and Margaret Atwood, are hard to stomach right now.

The “Galloway affair” prompted a backlash against lead-open-letter-writer Joseph Boyden, and his identity crisis, which had been simmering for years, suddenly became very public. Just a few months later, the “appropriation prize” was taken from a poorly executed satirical column in a literary journal to a social media sensation. This one went worldwide; they’re even talking about it the States (usually a cause for CanLit celebration.)

Where does a CanLit lover go from here? Who can you trust, if you can’t trust Margaret Atwood?

A good starting place might be to pick up a Canadian book by an author who neither wrote a UBC Accountable open letter, nor weighed in on Joseph Boyden’s ethnicity, nor pledged money to the #appropriationprize. Many such books were published by small presses this year, two of which are notable for offering new ways to think about how and why those scandals happened. They also offer a healthy dose of cynicism to help all those “Hooray Canada” lists go down.

Revolutions: Essays on Contemporary Canadian Fiction (Biblioasis, 2017) is a book of essays by Alex Good, the prolific literary critic and former editor of Canadian Notes and Queries. The introduction, a lament about aliteracy, or the increasing trendiness of not reading, was excerpted in The Walrus in March. Good is not as concerned about the much-exaggerated death of the book as he is about the death of the reader, and he believes that the death grip CanLit’s establishment has on literary culture is a major contributing factor. He also takes on a couple venerated Canadian authors (Douglas Coupland and David Adams Richards), literary prizes, and ebooks.

Good’s essays are a welcome alternative to the PR-friendly positive reviews found in the mainstream media. It’s refreshing to see our heroes taken down a notch in an actual essay, rather than in another tweet storm. Good is meticulous in his research, reading entire Giller longlists (really reading them!) just to make a point, and he has a wicked sense of humour, even as he laments the state of, well, everything. The last couple of chapters don’t quite fit the theme set out in the introduction, though. Good takes literary anthologies to task – two separate ones, in two separate essays. These anthologies are textbooks. Who would read them, apart from first year English students? Are textbooks supposed to be good? His criticism of the identity politics therein also seems a bit alarmist.

Aliteracy and taking literary heroes down a notch are also at the heart of Searching for Petronius Totem (Freehand Books, 2017), a satirical novel by poet, novelist, and PhD candidate Peter Unwin. Unwin’s academic research is about the death of the book, and that certainly plays into this raucous tale of two “literary artists” who get into all sorts of trouble–sex scandals, poorly-attended readings, ill-fated voyages across Lake Superior, and some sort of shady goings-on with a “digital fried chicken” company–all while trying to reconcile what it means to be a writer in Canada. It reads like a mash-up of Atwood at her most speculative, Coupland at his most curmudgeonly, and David McGimpsey’s Twitter feed.

While some of the satire is very broad–Petronius’s debunked memoir is titled “Ten Thousand Busted Chunks”–some of Unwin’s targets are pretty obscure. In an aliterate world, how much readership could there possibly be for jokes about Derrida and French critical theory? That said, this could be the right moment for a topical, immersive satire. Paul Beatty, the American novelist and poet, won The Man Booker Prize in 2016 for his satirical novel The Sellout, which is similarly dense, madcap, and hilarious.

Good and Unwin have much to say about the state of CanLit in 2017. After taking on the global trend of aliteracy in the introduction, Good goes in for the CanLit kill. In the essay “Shackled to a Corpse: The Long, Long Shadow of CanLit,” Good shows how CanLit is still dominated by the “Monsters of CanLit,” most of whom predate the Boomer generation. Whether they’re still with us (Atwood, Ondaatje, Munro) or not (Findley, Richler, Davies), these are the authors CanLit holds up, not just as the canon, but as today’s gold standard, to be idolized by all and imitated by writers fifty years their junior. On those “monsters” who are still writing, Atwood and Ondaatje in particular, Good says:

“The idea that in Canada the gerontocracy of the Golden Generation were producing their best work into the twenty-first century is, I think, patently ridiculous”

But the idea persists because:

“Establishments, in short, make things easy. The media always know what books and authors are worthy of coverage well in advance, and they can usually be expected to do their duty and say the right things.”

And this leads to a stagnancy, and a sameness, in the literary culture in this country:

“Forty years of this — tyranny? hegemony? enveloping dull sameness? slow march towards the grave? — has produced a desolate literary landscape. In some cases an exaggerated and damaging backlash has been the response, and in others an inferiority complex and state of psychological dependency.”

The recent CanLit scandals also prove Good’s point: the “Monsters of CanLit” are too big to fail. Atwood made astoundingly tone-deaf comments in the height of the Galloway scandal, yet less than a year later, she’s lauded as the saviour of feminism, thanks to a new adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale. No one’s even bothered to call out Ondaatje on his UBC Accountable open letter endorsement, and he’s remained awfully quiet throughout (his usual M.O.) Even Joseph Boyden, not quite a “monster” (yet), continues to book speaking engagements post-scandal, and his blockbuster The Orenda was included in Chapter’s “The World Needs More Canada” boxset in honour of Canada 150.

In later essays examining the Giller Prize longlists of 2006 and 2013, Good shows how small of a pond CanLit draws from. The same “Giller People” write, blurb, and award prizes to the same “Giller Books” year after year. The lens of “Giller People” is a useful one when thinking about scandals like UBC Accountable, in which Joseph Boyden (Giller Prize winner, 2008) writes an open letter defending his friend Steven Galloway (Giller Prize longlister, 2008), and convinces other Giller Prize winners (Michael Ondaatje, Margaret Atwood, Elizabeth Hay, Vincent Lam) to sign. And that’s just the winners. Of the near-one hundred signatories, there are too many lower-status Giller People (longlisters, judges, reviewers and blurb-writers) to list.

When asked about the CanLit outrage cycle, Good says it’s “kind of depressing” that the scandals draw the spotlight of media attention away from the actual writing: “The only time the media seems to pay any attention to Canadian writing is when they get to run these juicy, clickbait headlines that draw lots of eyeballs. Such stories encourage snap moral judgments, and get people worked up a lot more than a review of a new novel will.”

Meanwhile, in the fictional CanLit landscape of Searching for Petronius Totem, we meet our “heroes,” Jack and Petronius, just a couple of wild and crazy authors, without hope, without a clue, and notably, without readers. They embody Good’s theory about aliteracy, and in fact, you get the feeling they’d be insulted if people did start reading their work:

“‘I love this country, Jack, you know that. But it’s no place for artists. Believe me. You know that too.

‘It’s not supposed to be,’ I said. ‘I thought that was what we liked about it? No giant shadows to work under, no fame, no audience, no nothing. Pure art. Isn’t that what we said?’

Petronius shook his head and finished assembling a complex twelve-paper joint. ‘Yeah well. At least we can finally grow good weed.’”

If Good is calling for a revolution in CanLit, then Jack and Petro answer the call. Or rather, answered it, and found it all futile:

“‘Reality is over, Jack. Like the revolution.’

The room was spinning. The revolution, I thought. ‘What revolution?’

‘The revolution that we wrought. Me and you, Jack. The revolution that we forged with our own unstoppable artistic and sexual appetites. We waved the raised middle finger of our mighty members into the face of the world, remember?’

I stared at him. I remembered being drunk and doing several things I wish I hadn’t, but nothing like that.”

Some of Unwin’s satire is so spot on, it’s easy to forget that he wrote it pre-UBC Accountable. We meet Petronius while he’s teaching English to teenage girls at “Kamp Kan Lit” and it all, predictably, goes awry:

“Petronius Totem and Kamp Kan Lit were pillories on radio phone-ins, condemned from the newsroom, from the pulpit, from the lecture hall of Tim Hortons and Coffee Time, from behind the cash registers at Value Village, and from both floors of the provincial and federal legislatures…an apoplectic lady columnist with unfortunate hair accused Petro of conducting “a literary sex-slave colony” and demanded that he be “kneecapped, chemically castrated, and forced to do community service.”

When asked to comment on the recent CanLit scandals, Unwin echoes Good’s evocation of CanLit as a decaying corpse, or at least, something with a rotten core. On Galloway, he called out the “many so-called renowned Canadian authors [who] jumped on board to support the white male author and dismiss the concerns of the women.” On the appropriation prize scandal, Unwin described Hal Niedzviecki’s editorial in the Writers’ Union of Canada magazine, which kicked it all off, as “the Writer’s Union of Canada declar[ing] that they had the right to appropriate anyone’s culture that they wanted” and says that “it shows just how out of touch our so-called “renowned” writers have become.”

Despite its seemingly endless spiral into controversy and scandal, both authors hold out hope for CanLit. In Revolutions, Good praises certain Giller People, like Claire Messud and Lynn Coady. When asked for examples of quality contemporary CanLit, Good favours the margins: experimental writers Anakana Schofield (a Giller Person herself), C.P. Boyko and Chris Eaton, and genre fiction. He thinks “Canadian horror writing should be getting more attention,” and goes on to mention Tony Burgess (“Fifty years from now he may be the Canadian writer from this period with the greatest following, enjoying a sort of afterlife akin to Lovecraft’s”) and Craig Davidson (“The Troop is a horror classic, though it’s another one that requires a strong stomach”), as well as horror writers David Nickle, Brent Hayward, Robert Boyczuk. He’s most optimistic, and even a little envious, when speaking about the state of Canadian poetry: “Canadian poetry right now might be in even stronger shape [than fiction], though I’m no authority on that subject. I’ve just been blown away by some of the poetry I’ve read in the last decade or so. I wonder if there’s any connection there with the fact that we have so many great poetry critics currently active.”

Unwin sees the good in CanLit too, or at least, admits to being influenced by it, particularly by Stephen Leacock. He delights in Leacock’s observation, in Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, that suicide “often involves serious consequences,” holding that up as “the cornerstone of Canadian wit, that elevation of good down home Canadian stupidity into a type of redemptive art form.”

Unwin also mentions Grey Owl and Pauline Johnson as “foundational,” and praises poets Dorothy Livesay and Margaret Avison, but claims he tries not to remember authors’ names. “The literary world today demands that we turn ourselves into celebrities, and too many authors have fallen for this.”

But the optimistic tone disappears when Good and Unwin grapple with a literary boogey-man that transcends CanLit: the “digital apocalypse” (the title of Good’s final essay,) or as Unwin presents it towards the end of his novel, the end of reality itself via a digital fried chicken conglomerate:

“‘Reality, Jack. It’s a mess. It’s done like dinner. It’s proprietary now. Everyone’s going to have to pay for it. It’s all in the hands of the patent lawyers. Monthly rate on a bundled package…We’ve been mediated, commodified, signified, digitized, deconstructed, neo-liberalized, and now we’re getting chickenized.’”

In his final essay, Good takes shots at familiar online targets (Amazon.com, attention spans), but focuses his dread on two unavoidable outcomes of the rise of the internet: the commodification of books and the resulting race-to-the-bottom in ebook pricing, and, the narcissism that leads to more people writing than reading. Taken together, these conditions (no one wants to pay for books, let alone read them) could mean the death of the publishing industry, not to mention the death of the book as a sacred object:

“Perhaps this is our revenge on art, tearing it down from its pedestal and making it finally as disposable and ephemeral, as mortal, as the rest of mere humanity… No writer today can seriously believe that their words will long outlive them, even if they do manage to attract contemporary notice. So why bother?”

In Revolutions and Searching For Petronius Totem, criticism, humour, and satire subvert the usual feel-good public face of CanLit, and it couldn’t come at a better time. As our “monsters of CanLit” lurch towards more prizes, more bestsellers, and more acclaim, the rest of us–the new authors, the writers who are writing something other than “Giller Books,” the critics who are actually critical, the readers– might well ask, like Good, “why bother?”

A more productive question than “why bother” might be “why CanLit?” or, as carte blanche put it recently, “Who Needs CanLit?” Does reading and writing while Canadian mean one must engage in the CanLit machine, especially when, as Gwen Benaway put it in her “Who Needs CanLit” contribution: “the disconnect between the people who live in Canada and the writing which CanLit champions is wider and more ice laden than Hudson’s Bay”? Independent Canadian publisher Metatron doesn’t think so, tweeting this statement just after releasing their 2017 Fall catalogue: “Metatron is not CanLit. Metatron is something new that does not wish to be named.”

The urgent message in Good’s and Unwin’s books is that we must not let cynicism devolve into aliteracy. There is still value in reading critically, and in writing outside the usual CanLit confines. And they’re not the only ones. Writers like Benaway and publishers like Metatron believe there’s still value in having a literary culture in Canada, and you don’t have to drink the CanLit Kool-Aid (or eat the fibre optic fried chicken) to be a part of it.

Laura Frey is a book blogger at reading-in-bed.com. She has written book reviews for The Rusty Toque and Vue Weekly. She lives in Edmonton with her husband and two children. She is on Twitter at @LauraTFrey.

]]>http://carte-blanche.org/canlit-cynics-revolutions-alex-good-searching-petronius-totem-peter-unwin/feed/0Ritual Nostalgia: Revising the MFA Stasishttp://carte-blanche.org/ritual-nostalgia-revising-mfa-stasis/
http://carte-blanche.org/ritual-nostalgia-revising-mfa-stasis/#respondMon, 28 Aug 2017 15:09:27 +0000http://carte-blanche.org/?p=9303I DON'T REMEMBER WHEN I first heard of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, though I do remember the first time I lied to seem more impressive. I was six-years-old at the Jewish Public Library in Montréal, as was my childhood ritual. The library was a short walk away from the duplex I lived in facing a park. My older cousin was there—he was, very impressively, seven years old and a boy.

]]>I DON’T REMEMBER WHEN I first heard of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, though I do remember the first time I lied to seem more impressive. I was six-years-old at the Jewish Public Library in Montréal, as was my childhood ritual. The library was a short walk away from the duplex I lived in facing a park. My older cousin was there—he was, very impressively, seven years old and a boy.

I went up to the counter and checked out a book about cars. “This is for a project,” I lied to the librarian, unprompted. “I’m in the third grade.”

I remember that moment clearly because I still get the same feeling when I enter libraries, the sense of being transported—or at least the possibility of it. Browsing the stacks, I’m awed by the endless access to other ways of being. I love the idea that I could be another type of person if I put in the effort. I’m pulled equally towards the great unreads like War and Peace and the illustrated guides to sewing, knitting, and crocheting. If I wanted to I could become a competent gardener, part time mystic, hobby historian, or at the very least a person who understands their own taxes.

Twenty years ago I suppose the type of person I wanted to be was older and more impressive, subversively into cars instead of—what? Horses, ballet? The Olsen twins? It seemed important to have a serious project to work on, and my cousin’s bed was shaped like a racecar. Needless to say he outed me immediately; I don’t think I had the heart to even flip through the book on cars before returning it, knowing the librarian knew I was a fraud.

I’m not quite sure why this memory feels tied to where I am now. It has something to do with the idea of “impressiveness,” surely. Yet in an audacious turn of events, I don’t feel like a fraud at one of the most celebrated writing programs in North America. I certainly don’t feel uniquely gifted, either. Think of a precocious first grader attempting to masquerade as an automotive-loving third grader (and here I should mention that both my parents don’t drive), then think of what little difference there is between a six-year-old and an eight-year-old in the grand scheme of things.

So it’s not out of some self-satisfied modesty that I feel hesitant back home when people ask me where I’ve been most of the year, or when friends want to know if the program is really the way it’s portrayed on HBO. It’s out of knowing that there’s no huge difference between the talent and merit of a writer accepted to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a writer accepted to, say, the University of Guelph (where I’ve been once rejected and once waitlisted). There’s only the right mix of perseverance and good fortune that eventually finds your work in front of the right reader at the right time.

I would have been just as proud if I’d gotten into the MA program at the University of Toronto (also rejected), yet worse off financially which of course means worse off mental health-wise. Though I admit I do enjoy this unique brand of being taken seriously—a feeling it seems I’ve been searching for my entire life. The successes I’ve experienced are no fluke, yet in many ways I’m still a first grade fraud who likes having a project. I don’t take myself as seriously as I take my work and there’s always the library.

~

What’s the difference, I wonder, between ritual and routine? “Ritual” has religious connotations and an implied ceremoniousness that I find embarrassing, the same way I used to find the solemn songs and the monotone call-and-response in church embarrassing yet still felt left out when all the other fifth graders got their Confirmation and I did not, having just moved cities and schools after my parents divorced (and here I should mention that divorce is: A Sin).

Routine, however, is the ultimate comfort. I love me some routine. Using the word routine in a sentence, the dictionary offers: “I settled down into a routine of work and sleep.” I’ve never felt more seen. I’ve been trying to settle down into a routine of work and sleep my entire life. I can regularly be heard claiming that “I just need to get into the right routine” as if that will drastically improve every aspect of my being. Despite knowing better, I’m fascinated by other writer’s routines as if they’ll provide me with some sort of keystone.

One of the first shocks to my system in Iowa was the overabundance of the former and the sheer lack of the latter. The second shock was how nothing ever changed.

~

This summer back in Toronto was a complete dream in part because I was able to, for a few sweet months, completely reprise my pre-MFA routine. I moved back into the same room in the same apartment with the same best friend. I took back the same job on a flexible three-month contract. I went to the reading series’ I loved and missed, browsed used bookstores, and caught up with friends that I wish I was in a better habit of catching up with.

During one such catch-up over buck-a-shuck oysters (praise be), a friend asked if I’d read the new story in The New Yorker about a grad student in a creative writing MFA. I hadn’t but was intrigued. She described the story a little and I asked her to send me the link.

I read the story, “Show Don’t Tell” by Curtis Sittenfeld, absolutely riveted. It’s a really interesting portrayal of gender, exploring the rigid parameters of what constitutes a successful career and how misogyny and the sexist notion of ‘women’s fiction’ pervade writing communities. But in addition to all that—it’s Iowa! It is so Iowa that I forgot that nowhere in the story does it ever explicitly say that it’s Iowa. By the second paragraph the narrator has literally described my apartment, “a ten-minute walk from campus…on the second floor of a small, crappy Dutch Colonial, on the same street as a bunch of sororities and the co-op.” It’s my co-op! My second floor Dutch Colonial apartment!

I can’t help but get a kick out of the fact that various portrayals of my grad school experience reach such established platforms, the same way I was obsessed with observing my babyhood caught on tape when I watched home videos as a kid. Suffice it to say, someone should have installed some kind of software that kicked me off the internet every time I tried to re-watch the Iowa Writers’ Workshop episodes of Girls after I’d been accepted.

Maybe it’s because I never in a million years imagined being here, in a place rooted in the cultural imagination—in this writing program, in the United States, not a chill baby anymore but a person in her “late twenties.” As someone who struggles to live in the present and not 5 to 10 years in the future, I’d somehow stopped imagining myself aging beyond the Everywhere Legal age of 21.

Ruthie, the narrator in Sittenfeld’s story, is 25—the same age as me when I started the program. But the story takes place in 1998, almost two decades ago. This is where I run into some discomfort. The customs and rituals of this place are virtually unchanging, from the days that workshops are held on, to the bars people go to afterwards, right down to the week in March when students receive their funding offers in the mail. If it weren’t stated outright in the story, I would have assumed it was set today and not twenty years ago.

I don’t know if it makes sense to feel unsettled by this, but sometimes I find myself low-key unsettled. The architecture of celebrated MFA programs like Iowa reinforces the forward-propelling notion that we are part of a lauded and historied trajectory of literary production, while also providing a feeling of quaint timelessness and suspension. Considering the dark and deranged global moment we’re currently occupying, it’s a multipronged sense of unnerve. The fierce preservation of processes, procedures, and customs all around me simply amplifies the great existential arbitrariness of it all.

On a lighter note, I feel as if I’m missing something quintessentially American re: “laurels,” “pride,” “patriotism,” “tradition,” and “the passing of the baton.” Like a good Canadian I feel sort of sorry about it.

~

I maintain that MFA writing is the opposite of its institution—pleasurably unfixed. Do people still think that MFA programs crank out homogeneous, immediately recognizable types of writing? Readers would have a harder time identifying non-MFA fiction (if for the sole reason that the majority of writers now hold MFAs). I can’t bear to check in with Google, but I’m inclined to say that the discourse has moved beyond this gripe. Not that I’m any expert on “discourse,” and on top of that I’m a poet. Everything’s made up and the points don’t matter. There are no market demands because there is no market. I’m constantly reminded of this fact during the Workshop’s relatively frequent literary agent visits for the fiction cohort.

For example, Yaa Gyasi was accepted to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 2012. By 2015, in her mid twenties, she’d finished her novel and had an agent who sold Homegoing to Knopf for a seven-figure advance. Before Gyasi, Tony Tulathimutte attended the Workshop from 2010 to 2012 and published Private Citizens in 2016 with William Morrow (an imprint of HarperCollins). It was promptly named one of the best books of the year by all the usual suspects. I loved the book, yet it was a fabulous shock to my delicate sensibilities that Tulathimutte was invited on NBC’s Late Night with Seth Meyers to talk about it. Workshop alumna Jenny Zhang just published her short story collection Sour Heart with Lena Dunham’s Lenny imprint at Random House, and so on.

I find the successes of these vibrant new voices otherworldly yet heartening in the same way I found Alexander Chee’s essay “My Parade” heartening when I first read it. Chee describes applying to writing programs “as a cynic, submitting a story that included explicitly gay sex, psychic powers, and the occult,” as a rebellious assertion of his identity that he refused to bulldoze over. Like many, Chee initially envisioned the MFA program (with Iowa as its main cog) as “a machine that strips away all originality,” where the “people who enter [look] like themselves and emerge like the writerly version of Barbie dolls, plastic and smooth and saleable, an army of American minimalists.” To his surprise, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop embraced his “freak” self[1] with a considerable funding offer[2].

Considering the stakes, especially for fiction writers, especially for fiction writers in prestigious American MFA programs, there are surely outside forces that push certain pens in more marketable directions. More than just the heightened access to agents and book deals and (sometimes serious) cash-money, what actually floors me is the access to… what? Relevancy beyond-the-bubble?

Regardless, back inside the bubble, writing programs are so incredibly valuable because they offer room for our ideas, voices, styles, and whims to stew in the big delicious crockpot called Time. It tastes better than scarfing down deli meat straight from the fridge between various financial anxieties, apartment hunts, job searches, and freelance gigs, though we must all return to the glow of that fridge eventually.

~

To return to “Show Don’t Tell,” Sittenfeld gave a short interview to The New Yorker about the story. The Iowa Writers’ Workshop is, again, not specifically referenced (except in relation to a novel by Eric Bennett). It wouldn’t be such a big deal if it didn’t feel like an elephant in the room, as someone on the inside. Sittenfeld says she only decided to “put [Ruthie] in a writing program for the first draft, just as a place-holder, with a plan of subsequently scraping away all references to writing,” but admits to soon realizing that the story couldn’t be about anything else. She also says that she’s not a huge fan of “writing-program fiction,” but then goes on to call herself “robustly hypocritical,” so fair enough. I like her.

But then the interviewer mentions the “time period” of the story, noting that there’s something “nostalgic about the setting” because, among other things, students are “waiting by their mailboxes for letters and not for e-mails.” To which Sittenfeld responds:

You’ve actually answered this question for me. If one of the unresolved plot points is what kind of funding Ruthie has received, it’s a lot easier for it to remain unresolved if she doesn’t have a cell phone (or can’t, say, leave the party, check her mail, then Uber back across the river).

It was at this point that I actually doubted the Iowa connection. If the story is actually based on the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, wouldn’t Sittenfeld know that she needn’t set the scene in 1998 for her plot points to remain unresolved? Iowa City just got Uber in 2016. I received my funding offer by mail the same week Ruthie did in the story and then had to go speak to someone in person to accept (bonus: the “program associate” I had to speak to is the same one Alexander Chee speaks to when he receives his acceptance in “My Parade”). Dare I remind you that the mail originated from a location that I frequent almost daily and is a ten-minute walk away from my apartment?

I don’t think it’s any great spoiler to reveal that, thanks to some quick Wikipedia action, I discovered that Curtis Sittenfeld did graduate from Iowa. Though I was wary about why she skirts mentioning the writing program by name, especially after describing it in extremely recognizable detail, it’s just sort of struck me—there’s actually no real reason for her to know that the program is operating the same way it did when she graduated 20 years ago. I mean, right?

In all likelihood she’s continued on with her career publishing books, leaving the fossils of those years behind in that sacred chunk of amber we call nostalgia.

~

The pros of being part of being seemingly fixed in time is the fact that everything is still analog. The poster, flyer, and photocopier industries are thriving. It feels nice to have a personal mailbox and a class cubby. I’ve rebooted my love for nice pens, pencils, markers, and highlighters. The Midwest seems to promote the crafting spirit in me and I’ve designed many elaborate and colourful birthday cards. Everyone prints out stories and poems, and laptops are generally out of sight in workshops and seminars. It seems the specific set of processes and procedures that make up the monolith of the program along with its tactility have set the stage for a heightened sense of innovation among students. Perhaps I’m able to view it in such a positive light because I opt-out of certain rituals (I have not built my experience around the sort of competitive friendships and “torrid love affairs” that Ruthie has in Sittenfeld’s story, for example).

For one of my first poetry workshops in Iowa someone submitted drawings and handwritten text that reminded me of Daniel Johnston, bill bissett, and a gifted yet troubled toddler. It’s—dare I say it—fun to observe and engage with all the weird and wildly different stuff my classmates are up to. I feel sort of honoured. One is not always lucky enough to enjoy the same sundry experience reading a literary journal, perusing a publishing catalogue, or attending an award ceremony, which can all feel quite uniform. Someone writes oddball persona poems that are maddeningly self-referential, include footnotes, and yet are inexplicably hilarious. There are New Formalists and Ashbery fanboys/girls and at least one feminist cyberpunk. I learned about the dustbowl and a lot of new American history.

So I come back to Chee’s metaphor of the “Barbie dolls, plastic and smooth and saleable.” If anything, that might refer more aptly to the ritual sense of preservation, the inherited cultural moors, and the somewhat standardized, white experience of the writing program. It’s the writers who inhabit the dollhouse that briefly animate it with a sense of possibility and then go on to create new spaces in their communities that are fluid and constantly reevaluating.

As Ruthie knows by the end of the story and twenty years after her grad school experience, people are writers by the “way they inhabit the world, the way they observe it”—not the MFA vs NYC world, not the literary or academic world, and not a world perfumed by nostalgia and ritual that people hope to extend beyond two years of grad school. It’s that perfect and unglamourous writerly world you can taste, touch, or create for yourself at the Jewish Public Library.

[1] Though MFA programs are seeped in toxic whiteness, it can be exciting to experience the successes of Gyasi, Tulathimutte, and Chee, alongside their program-poet counterparts Terrence Hayes, Ocean Vuong, Kaveh Akbar, and others. At a glance I can get behind the sentiment that writing programs have a “more overt interest in cultural pluralism,” as Chad Harbach puts it, compared to the publishing world where “it still avails one to be a white guy in NYC.”

[2] Yet Safiya Sinclair’s recent interview with The Rumpus, talking about being the only black poet in both years of her MFA at the University of Virginia and having to endure encountering the Robert E. Lee statue and other “historic” slavery monuments in Charlottesville, is not only topical and horrific but also reckons with the actual state of affairs within the academy. It’s no haven. Listen to a roundtable discussion of Sinclair’s incredible poetry collection Cannibal on The Rusty Toque’s On the Line podcast.

Domenica Martinello, from Montréal, was a finalist for the 2017 Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. She is completing an MFA in poetry at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and her debut collection of poetry, All Day I Dream About Sirens, is forthcoming.

]]>http://carte-blanche.org/ritual-nostalgia-revising-mfa-stasis/feed/0QWF Writes: Interview with Robert Edison Sandifordhttp://carte-blanche.org/qwf-writes-interview-robert-edison-sandiford/
http://carte-blanche.org/qwf-writes-interview-robert-edison-sandiford/#respondThu, 17 Aug 2017 19:32:08 +0000http://carte-blanche.org/?p=9284EVERY COUPLE OF WEEKS, Robert Edison Sandiford calls me from Barbados. Robert is one of this year’s Quebec Writers' Federation mentors and I am his protégé. We’ve made arrangements to speak at 5 pm via Skype so this interview would feel more face-to-face. At 5:10, we still have no audio so he switches from his laptop to his desktop. At 5:25 the recording app on my phone stops working. At 5:37 we decide we’ll have to hobble back and forth between the computers, a phone, and another phone app to make it work. Afterwards, when it’s all sorted, he say: “Well, there’s a lesson about tenacity.”

]]>This conversation between Pamela Hensley and Robert Edison Sandiford is an extended version of the original posted as part of the QWF Writes series.

EVERY COUPLE OF WEEKS, Robert Edison Sandiford calls me from Barbados. Robert is one of this year’s Quebec Writers’ Federation mentors and I am his protégé. We’ve made arrangements to speak at 5 pm via Skype so this interview would feel more face-to-face. At 5:10, we still have no audio so he switches from his laptop to his desktop. At 5:25 the recording app on my phone stops working. At 5:37 we decide we’ll have to hobble back and forth between the computers, a phone, and another phone app to make it work. Afterwards, when it’s all sorted, he say: “Well, there’s a lesson about tenacity.”

Robert was born in Montreal to Barbadian parents. He is the author of nine books that range in form from short and long fiction to memoir, graphic novels, and erotica. Over a period of four months, he’s worked with me on my own collection of stories and we’ve talked about many things: process and voice, the German writer Jenny Erpenbeck, and how baking helps to reduce stress. Robert answers my questions below.

– Pamela Hensley

PAMELA HENSLEY:

Let’s start with a quote from Fairfield, your most recent collection of short stories. In reference to engaging fiction, you say: “All that matters…is the individual and the moment.” Can you expand on that?

ROBERT SANDIFORD:

In the context of the collection, it had to do with making the most of art. It had to do with knowing when something is ready or when an artist has what it takes. It comes from a quote by Matthew Arnold [“For the creation of a masterwork…two powers must concur, the power of the man and the power of the moment, and the man is not enough without the moment”]. How do you know when you’ve got what it takes? All we are is who we are and the talent that we have. My contention is that most people are a little better than they think they are. They can do better than they’ve done.

PH:

This is why you’re a mentor.

RS:

Maybe.

PH:

Besides being a mentor, you’re an editor and teacher. How does one turn a good manuscript into a great one?

RS:

There has to be that spark within the work itself, or within the writer. It might even be both. In terms of a process, if you see that spark you have to figure out not so much what’s working with it but what’s not working. Note the stuff that I don’t change – look at it and say, ah this is good, he didn’t touch this – then note what I questioned. What you’re doing right, you’re doing right. That’s not an issue. The real challenge is figuring out how to improve or how to fix the problems in a manuscript. Once you get that right, you bring everything up. I think that’s how you turn a good manuscript into a great one.

PH:

How much of the process is intuitive vs. deliberate?

RS:

Maybe it’s a bit more intuitive than we think. The grammar, the rules and laws, if you know that you can fix it but sometimes, looking at, let’s see even your own work – at Til Menken for instance [one of my stories] – I can see the guy but am I seeing him as clearly as I would like to? There’s a bit of a shadowy area there and I can’t pinpoint where that shadow’s coming from, or what’s casting it, but I know I need more light on him. You kind of go with that.

PH:

What about turning good writers into great writers? Can you do that?

RS:

Possibly. Possibly. But there has to be something inside that person already that lends themselves to greatness. And it may depend on how we define greatness. There are a lot of artists, not just writers, people who never enjoy recognition while they were alive or young enough to enjoy it. So there’s that question again, of the individual and the moment, and the individual and talent. There’s certain things you can teach people to make them better writers but that sort of greatness, that may also depend on themselves.

PH:

Okay. So good writers can at least get better.

RS:

They need someone to help them fix their mistakes.

PH:

They need an editor! What else helps?

RS:

A writer who pays attention. A writer who listens. You can advise somebody only so much and say, look, do this, do that, and chances are you’ll get better results. But you know how it is. People get their own ideas. When a writer trusts his or her editor and an editor trusts her writer, that’s when you can get some results happening. That’s what really helps to bring out greatness. When I edit someone’s work, I ask, what are you trying to accomplish? If you say, I’m really interested in Erpenbeck’s style of approach then I’ll say, okay, let’s look at that and see how we accomplish that for yourself, not mimicking, not imitating, but finding your own style and voice. It really is about working with a good editor. And if you can’t get a good editor get a good reader or something like that.

PH:

Should developing writers work as editors to become better writers?

RS:

It can be useful for writers to work as editors but not every writer makes a good editor.

PH:

Hmm. Why not?

RS:

This might sound funny, but it’s because they can’t write. Technically. Some writers are great storytellers but in terms of getting that down on the page, in a way that won’t have readers running the opposite direction, that’s a challenge. Other writers are very technically proficient but they struggle to bring their stories alive. And some writers are gifted and they can do both.

PH:

How does one judge the quality of one’s own work?

RS:

Honesty. If you know you have a line that is not as true as it needs to be, put an asterisk beside it. Go back to it. Even put a note next to it for the editor, this section, I can’t get it right. Or the ending is eluding me. Sometimes you can fake it but most people know, so what’s the point?

PH:

Sometimes, in workshops, say, readers are trying to be kind. How do you know who to trust?

RS:

You have to recognize who is sympathetic to your work. Who gets you and where you’re coming from. That doesn’t mean you should only side with people who agree with you or who are like-minded, but there might be someone in your group that, no matter what you bring them, no matter how good the work is, they won’t see it. It might be personal bias, jealousy. Whatever it is. Other people will come and see exactly what you’re doing. But they won’t just see your good stuff, they’ll also say, I like what you did but I think it would be stronger if you did that. And you say, oh. Oh! I have to step up my game now.

PH:

In Fairfield, the editor writes that G. Brandon Sisnett borrowed from other authors including one from Montreal who wrote Caribbean fiction on the themes of “familial loss and managing the pain of living.” Which are themes that happen to recur in your work. Would you like to talk about theme?

RS:

Yeah. I’m curious about theme. Both of us are writing from a particular place. Germany finds its way into your stories, as well as Canada. For me, it’s Barbados and Canada. Montreal. Bridgetown. Theme is distinct from subject matter but they inform each other. For me a sense of place is important. I write out of where I am but also where I come from. I do believe that all writing is regional, in a sense. People talk about things being universal but I don’t know how much we really think about it as writers. We want everyone to read our stories and everyone to relate to them but I think, again, it goes to honesty. If you write in a way that is honest, the regional will get you to the universal. Someone will pick up the story half way around the world and say, I relate.

PH:

Is place a detail?

RS:

Place is a necessary detail, your characters have got to be somewhere, but it’s more than that. It’s a space in which you invite the reader to share an experience. It’s about learning, actually. I have a friend who says, if she’d not learning anything in writing what she’ writing, then she stops writing the story. She wants other people to learn something. If I write about a particular place, I want you to feel that place. I want you to experience it as if you were actually there. Unless having a non-descript setting is important to telling the story, then why have this non-descript thing? And I get the answer, but I want it to be universal. I just say, stop. Stop. What you may be doing is taking out the necessary edges that people need to relate to the story even more so.

PH:

What about writing to correct misunderstandings about a place? Do you do that?

RS:

That’s certainly a part of it. Because where I often write out of, the Caribbean, Barbados, is misunderstood. It’s an area of darkness for people. They have a particular view of that place. But this is true of any place, even bigger places. Everyone thinks they know New York. Everyone thinks they know Germany. Do they? I think writers do write to correct misunderstandings. But one has to be careful. It’s not about serving yourself, it’s about serving the story.

PH:

Junot Diaz talks about this.

RS:

Yeah. He would because he does come out of the Caribbean as well. Dominican Republic. And yes, it’s a big deal for certain writers. It’s important to get this right. This place is a real place. Erpenbeck is very much in my mind now, with where she’d writing from. People will mythologize a place. They will deliberately twist what a place is. I’m going to get one of her books from you! You see, I don’t think we’re too far apart in what we’re trying to do as writers. You’re also trying to offer a measure of correction in telling an entertaining story, which is important. But you’re saying, look here and understand. Understand these people. Understand this place. Then you might also understand a bit more about yourself and your own humanity. Just going to the last story you sent me, Manny’s Bar. I found your use of the “Heidi” character interesting. She was misunderstood. German, Norwegian, Swedish, whatever. We all know this. I got a lot about a place through displacement, through the character.

PH:

You’re referred to in some blurbs as a literary activist. What’s a literary activist?

RS:

The simplest answer is, these days, people don’t read as much as they could, should, used to and our literacy has slipped. The type of activism I’m engaged in is on the literary front, making sure that people read – my books but also other people’s books. It’s making sure that writers, such as yourself, with obvious talent have opportunities to progress. To get better. To, I dare say it, outstrip me. We’re all competitors. Iron sharpens iron. So it’s about pushing literary works and literacy.

PH:

What’s the difference between style and voice?

RS:

Style and voice tend to be synonymous. But to make a differentiation, when writers are starting out I like to talk about an approach. I used to talk about style but I think writers get confused. They say, but the way I put it down is a style. I like to use all these ellipses when I write, that’s my style. And you say, no, no, that’s more of an approach and it may even be a bad approach. Style is something that you develop over time. Voice, to me, is all those things combined. It’s reading a work and recognizing who it is. Ultimately, what comes with it is a commitment to telling a story in a particular way. It cannot be told by anybody else.

PH:

And how do writers develop their voice?

RS:

I think writers should perhaps concentrate more on storytelling and less on developing that voice. As long as you’re writing, as long as you’re writing honestly, that will emerge. And when it emerges may be very different from when you think it does. I remember, a writer once said to me, Robert, I see with this book you finally found your voice. And I thought I’d found it before. The thing is, just to write the best stories you can. Write them as authentically as you can.

PH:

Is voice conscious?

RS:

Yes and no. I think all writers aspire to sound a certain way. We don’t write to sound like anybody else, we write to sound, so we think initially, like ourselves. But voice goes beyond that. I think at the highest level, it just comes out. You write and the voice that you have comes out.

PH:

Like personality?

RS:

Yes, I think it is like personality. But that can be a dangerous thing, especially when people know you. Someone might pick up one of your stories, for instance, and say, this sounds like Pamela. The way she wrote that, I heard her say that before. And they completely miss the story that is there because they’re looking for you. You will be there, I hear your voice already in the stories, it’s emerging, it’s developing, but personality is a tricky word. But readers aren’t looking for personality, they’re looking for character, for plot, for atmosphere.

PH:

Is it still possible for writers to be “discovered”?

RS:

I was reading about Michael Chabon and his own trajectory as a writer. I think it’s still possible to get discovered but it calls for somebody to be there in your corner. I don’t think anybody gets anywhere without somebody’s assistance. When it comes to doing what we do, it requires talent, determination, and luck. You know. Once you have those three, you will get somewhere. Will you get as far as X,Y,Z, plug in a name, I don’t know. But I think people are discovered all the time. I think I’m discovering writers all the time.

PH:

You published your first story collection more than 20 years ago, in 1995. Does it get any easier?

RS:

Hell, no. [Laughter]. Publishing is more difficult now than it was before. There’s more competition, more avenues. The Internet has changed the industry and how we approach what we do. Coming up with a story, I don’t know that that gets any easier. What gets easier, maybe, is knowing what works and what doesn’t. But the challenge remains the same. It’s just you and the page, or the screen, and you got to make it work. How do you know if you’ve made it work? That goes to instinct. This is maybe where the older writer has the advantage, the more certain you are of the type of success you might have, the more certain you are that this is working, there’s butter in my pan and it’s flowing. And you also know when it’s not. Does it get easier? No. But I wake up every morning doing what I do and I have no regrets. Ever. That’s a hell of a thing to be able to say.

]]>http://carte-blanche.org/qwf-writes-interview-robert-edison-sandiford/feed/0Shaping a New Voice — Or, How the Spectre of Censorship Still Haunts Mehttp://carte-blanche.org/shaping-new-voice-spectre-censorship-still-haunts/
http://carte-blanche.org/shaping-new-voice-spectre-censorship-still-haunts/#respondThu, 20 Jul 2017 17:07:48 +0000http://carte-blanche.org/?p=9262I WAS IN MY mid-to-late twenties when I decided to write in English. A few obvious obstacles stood out: I wasn’t a native speaker and I was working in a totally unrelated field: software engineering. However, I was an immigrant in Canada, and had been lectured more than once on how people in Canada could pursue what their heart desired (a female friend with a knack in operatic singing, unable to officially practice it in Iran, found her voice here in Canada; others in engineering backgrounds formed bands; etc.). The optimism of my age made me venture into uncharted territory. However, there was another less obvious challenge ahead of me: what to write about?

]]>This summer, carte blanche is curating a short series of articles under the theme WHO NEEDS CANLIT? We’ve invited critical perspectives on the status of Canadian literature. No, this isn’t another faux-edgy Canadian CanCon production to put you to sleep! It’s intended to function more as a wake-up call. Follow the action under the hashtag #whoneedsCanLit. Today’s instalment is an essay by Mehdi M. Kashani.

I WAS IN MY mid-to-late twenties when I decided to write in English. A few obvious obstacles stood out: I wasn’t a native speaker and I was working in a totally unrelated field: software engineering. However, I was an immigrant in Canada, and had been lectured more than once on how people in Canada could pursue what their heart desired (a female friend with a knack in operatic singing, unable to officially practice it in Iran, found her voice here in Canada; others in engineering backgrounds formed bands; etc.). The optimism of my age made me venture into uncharted territory. However, there was another less obvious challenge ahead of me: what to write about?

Coming from Iran, a country where you should be cognizant, all the time, of not stepping on some sensitive toe (religiously, politically, sexually), it felt great to be able to write practically about anything. The themes that Canadian writers have dealt with in the past ran the gamut from the apocalypse (Margaret Atwood) to World War II (Michael Ondaatje) to family dramas (Alice Munro), among other topics. Lots of opportunities existed and I had dozens of stories to tell. But, my frequent forays into libraries and local bookstores to familiarize myself with published writers from Iranian backgrounds proved that my initial assessment was not entirely true. While you could find books on any subject in Canada, it turned out Iranian writers had only a tiny share of the topical spectrum. It was as if they were pigeonholed into predefined subject matter, that of political tyranny and its aftermath[1]. For example, Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, Shirin Ebadi’s Iran’s Awakening, Marina Nemat’s Prisoner of Tehran, Sahar Delijani’s Children of the Jacaranda Tree, Ava Homa’s Echoes from the Other Land, Dalia Sofer’s Septembers of Shiraz and many other semi-memoir/semi-fictional works all contain the same overarching themes. Also, if you’ve been held in Iran’s jails and then released, you’re guaranteed to have landed yourself a book deal (Roxana Saberi, Maziar Bahari, Ramin Jahanbegloo and Haleh Esfandiari come to mind. Jason Rezaian, a Washington Post reporter, jailed for 18 months in Tehran, is currently working on a memoir too).

Some of these books are really good. A few have literary merits. There’s no doubt they are stories and accounts worth telling. After all, these books deal with big issues of freedom, resistance and human redemption. But is that a comprehensive snapshot of the realities of contemporary Iran? Aren’t Iranians, like any other people in the world, dealing with day-to-day issues like family reunions, college romances, holiday trips, camping adventures, troubled children, dysfunctional families, diseases and deaths (outside of prison, that is)[2]?

My immigration to Canada coincided with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s rise to power and his incendiary remarks on wiping Israel off the map (among other things). Ahmadinejad won an election riding on his populist promises and also by taking full advantage of the sterility of the reformist movement in the final years of then-president Mohammad Khatami’s reign. In those days, rarely did I appear at a gathering in Vancouver without encountering some variation on the question, “What’s wrong with your president?” (At the time, people didn’t know his name by heart). My response was an ashamed and silent shrug, partly because my confidence in speaking English was still low. If I had responded, I’d have said that as much as Ahmadinejad made a good topic for cocktail parties, he was not how Iran should be represented. But continuing the conversation in the same vein, I would have had a hard time finding a book to recommend, something not necessarily confrontational and politically charged. The feeling one gets by reading the Iranian literature available in the North American market is that of a war-torn country. Imagine if American literature in the Cold War Era was exclusively about the Soviet Union and the machinations of the Cold War.

So I did what I could to address the two salient challenges to my becoming a writer. I read voraciously and wrote profusely in English. I jumped from proof-reader to proof-reader, finally landing with someone who I trust with my writing. Obviously, it was—and continues to be—a paying service, an overhead that most native English writers can get away without[3]. That means in order to create art which comes with scarce monetary rewards, I had to financially invest. As for making time for my vocation, I made some arrangements. My apartment is minutes away from where I work, a luxury in Toronto. Also, my boss agreed I work half days on Wednesdays, to be able to write in larger chunks.

But again, even with all these things in place, the concern of what I should write about kept creeping back.

Nowadays, the concept of “cultural appropriation” is widely discussed in the media. It refers to any adoption of the defining elements of a culture by another—that is, by an outsider. Most of the time, the culture being appropriated is part of a minority and appropriators are part of the dominant culture. In the context of literature, the opponents of this phenomenon argue that a writer from the dominant culture should not write about minority experiences, be it race, ethnicity, sexual orientation or any other dividing factor.

Lionel Shriver, the American writer residing in the U.K., gave a controversial, rather scandalous speech in Melbourne on the topic of cultural appropriation. In her candid, provocative words, she claims that as a writer, she has the right to write about anything and anyone that serves her novels. In her opinion, constraining writers to write only about their own demographic limits their abilities. At the end of her speech, she vehemently defends a writer’s right to venture into anything, any topic, any body that interests them. This is because, according to Shriver, it’s the writer’s primary job to imagine the goings-on in the mind of the characters, none of whom are the writer’s replica, unless she’s writing memoir.

While enforcing limitation on what you write about sounds like a kind of cultural dictatorship to the writers of the dominant culture, the same argument can be said about the writers of the minority. If you think back to my introductory paragraphs, there seems to be a reverse phenomenon in effect here. In my case—as an Iranian-Canadian writer—as much as non-Iranian writers are frowned upon writing about Iran under the label of cultural appropriation, Iranian writers are encouraged, or forced, to write about certain issues.

Like any other market, literature thrives in a supply-and-demand milieu. But, it’s not easy to determine which one is the cause and which the effect. After 9-11, we can’t know if there was a slew of writers having things to say about the violent event, or if there were many readers with an unquenchable thirst who wanted to read about it. By the same token, it’s hard to decide whether Iranians in the diaspora write about topics of war and prison and other diasporic traumas because they find them interesting or whether the North American readers demand it of these writers.

One can argue that we Iranian immigrant writers are enjoying our earned freedom to write about topics we’re not allowed to tackle within Iran’s borders. Also, I’m sure some of us feel an urgency to talk about the ordeals we’ve experienced. On the other hand, Canadian and American publishers tend to trust these topics will sell as they seem to think they’re eye-opening, controversial and will easily find their readers.

I think the first victims of this vicious circle are those very writers who produce books about a limited-Iranian experience as they become a predictable collective who write—or who are forced to write—about the same stuff. The merits of books and literature will be neglected if, after a while, readers start labelling Iranian writers’ books simply as another prison story set in Iran. In fact, in a healthy and diverse balance of subjects, where the same theme doesn’t constitute the majority of the canon, these writers and their work would stand out, showcased in better light.

Like any other writer, I’m attracted to certain themes and, inevitably, they appear in my work. As someone who grew up in Iran, her politics have formed me in many ways. In particular, I’ve always been interested in the lives of individuals who were affected, directly or indirectly, by the major upheavals in the country’s recent history. It’s only natural these themes would ooze into my stories. Interestingly though, in my subconscious (or sometimes this even happens consciously), I resist writing about these themes, resist becoming another Iranian writer who CanLit and American literature can put safely in a box. It’s a Faustian pact. I don’t want to be pigeonholed and don’t want to be culturally appropriated.

It took me a few years to first get published in English. My writing abilities aside, prose and poetry are generally the hardest variations of art to migrate into a new culture, as opposed to forms like painting and music that use audio or visual cues. Over the past half-year, I had six short stories published. Two of them didn’t involve Iranian characters or themes; however, in the other four, the nationality and Iranian cultural context of the protagonists were crucial to the story. These four stories mostly deal with individuals at a pivotal junction in their personal lives. While you can always trace any drama to the rulers or governments, the major themes I’ve discussed above aren’t salient in these stories. As an example, in my short story “Dayi” (published in The Malahat Review No. 198) a middle-aged, affluent Iranian man is about to join his family in Vancouver—which means he has to part with his object of desire, a young student who is the same age as his daughter. It is a story about the intricacies of relationship at different levels and also about immigration and its after effects. At the time of writing this story, I felt the protagonist (and his family) represent a good portion of the Iranian immigrants in Canada who aren’t represented as they should be in CanLit. When the piece got published, the editor of TMRinterviewed me and expressed his surprise about certain passages in “Dayi.” His surprise, admittedly, came from what Canadian and American media feed the public.

Recently, I had a collection of short stories in Farsi, The Innocent Gaze of Irene, published in Iran by Nila Publication. I carefully handpicked the stories to be consonant with the norms Iranian writers must meet and yet it took the Ministry of Guidance two and a half years to grant permission for publication. Now, in Canada, while I write or create characters in English, a kind of self-censorship agent governs my thoughts, to guarantee that I don’t sell out, that I don’t yield to what is expected of me. Ironically, this process isn’t dissimilar to the self-censoring skills I or any other writer develops in Iran to appease the censorship authorities.

This realization is a wake-up call. If I am to be selective about what I write about, then why bother with all the challenges I mentioned earlier that come along with writing in English and participating in CanLit? I could easily as well continue writing in Farsi, adhering to the strict rules of that market. Moreover, if I’m critical about the scarcity of the themes writers with Iranian backgrounds pick up, shouldn’t the same criticisms apply to me, a writer who deliberately shuns those themes? Granted, immigration is an area worth exploring. But I don’t want to be “pigeonholed” as that kind of writer either. Not because I’m afraid of a label. After all, most writers are associated with a theme or topic they’re particularly good at. And that’s my point: what we’re good at should be determined by our inherent abilities, not by what we’re obliged to write because of our background. Lionel Shriver’s proclamation about her right to write about anything is fair, but only when every other writer, regardless of their background, can practice the same right, freely and without censure by readers or by markets or by terms like CanLit.

In this creative marketplace I’m imagining, writers should actively publish works on any subject they desire and step back. The real worth of these stories should be determined by reader—and by a diverse body of critics. This is the only way to make sure the next time I’m asked about Iran, I’ll have a varied list of book recommendations handy.

[1] Obviously, I’ve excluded classics in poetry and prose like Rumi and Sadeq Hedayat from this list.

[3] Everyone will eventually need an editor. Here, I’m talking about the additional layer of editing that someone writing in their second or third language requires.

Mehdi M. Kashani lives and writes in Toronto, Canada. One of his short stories in Persian won first-place in the Sadeq Hedayat 12th Annual Short Story Contest in 2014. His fiction has appeared in Passages North, The Malahat Review, Portland Review, The Los Angeles Review, Hobart and Litro.

]]>http://carte-blanche.org/shaping-new-voice-spectre-censorship-still-haunts/feed/0An introductory note from carte blanche’s new editor!http://carte-blanche.org/introductory-note-carte-blanches-new-editor/
http://carte-blanche.org/introductory-note-carte-blanches-new-editor/#respondThu, 29 Jun 2017 14:50:27 +0000http://carte-blanche.org/?p=9246As a rule when writing, I avoid the obvious in the first line, but today the excitement is impatient and uncontainable: I am so very pleased and honoured to accept the editorship of carte blanche, to work with the fantastic current masthead, to sustain and refine an established journal that publishes pivotal contemporary voices—George Elliott Clarke, Madeleine Thien, Heather O’Neill, Gwen Benaway, Kayla Czaga, Domenica Martinello, Meags Fitzgerald, among many others—and to engage as a community of writers and artists centered in Montreal and spiraling out throughout Quebec, Canada, and North America.

]]>As a rule when writing, I avoid the obvious in the first line, but today the excitement is impatient and uncontainable: I am so very pleased and honoured to accept the editorship of carte blanche, to work with the fantastic current masthead, to sustain and refine an established journal that publishes pivotal contemporary voices—George Elliott Clarke, Madeleine Thien, Heather O’Neill, Gwen Benaway, Kayla Czaga, Domenica Martinello, Meags Fitzgerald, among many others—and to engage as a community of writers and artists centered in Montreal and spiraling out throughout Quebec, Canada, and North America.

carte blanche means complete freedom, a literal blank page, an expanse of possibility for new writing and art. It implies an inclusionary model of critical thinking through creativity. The intention is to open up, to flower, to accept, to provide a forum for literature that reaches beyond preconceptions and allows for collective independence within the craft of (primarily) English-language poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, translation, comics, photography, and a synthesis of these.

The name carte blanche seems particularly relevant to me in the current climate of calling the status quo of CanLit into question, and rightfully so. [boundaries / borders / boredoms] carte blanche inherently embraces a model of resistance that, instead of imposing a barrier and pushing away, invites a new, auto-generated literary agreement—the freedom for each individual to assert their own literature, to articulate concerns and approaches and ways of being through words and images. This is a model that energizes me, and I aim to invest in it with time and drive, creating opportunities for others, and contributing to the production of a poised, apposite publication that arrests its readership.

The name carte blanche seems particularly relevant to me in the current climate of calling the status quo of CanLit into question.

As the new editor of carte blanche I commit to nurturing a sense of generosity in literary publishing; to publishing, promoting, and supporting a range of original writing and artwork from a diversity of authors and artists; to offering visibility and professional opportunities to both new and prominent writers. In concrete terms, I will collaborate with carte blanche’s section editors to curate three consistently excellent issues annually of literature and visual art; to expand the à la carte blog as a critical counterpart to the poetry, fiction, and graphic work in the issues proper; to follow up on and discuss themes, movements, concerns within the Canadian and international literary worlds; to enter carte blanche into dialogue with external literary projects developing throughout Canada—like new small presses and chapbook publications, reading series, contests—and to celebrate each new issue of carte blanche with a launch event and public reading, to foster a sense of community and belonging within the Montreal home base.

I look forward to working with you as a community of writers, artists, readers, and friends. Thank you for your curiosity and attention as carte blanche composes the forthcoming Fall issue scheduled for October 2017. Please be in touch with thoughts, pitches, contributions, and just to say hi!

Klara du Plessis is a Montreal-based poet, critic, and editor. Her chapbook, Wax Lyrical — shortlisted for the bpNichol Chapbook Award—was released from Anstruther Press, 2015; and a debut collection, Ekke, is forthcoming from Palimpsest Press, 2018. Poems have recently appeared in Asymptote, Canthius, CV2, LRC, PRISM, among others. She curates the Resonance Reading Series; writes reviews and essays for The Montreal Review of Books and The Rusty Toque; and is now the editor of carte blanche.